New England Journal of Public Policy

This article examines the radicalization of young Southeast Asians into the violent extremism that characterizes the notorious Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). After situating ISIS within its wider and older Al Qaeda Islamist ideological milieu, the article sketches out the historical landscape of violent Islamist extremism in Southeast Asia. There it focuses on the Al Qaeda-affiliated, Indonesian-based but transnational Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) network, revealing how the emergence of ISIS has impacted JI’s evolutionary trajectory. The article surveys major explanations of how radicalization into violent extremism (RIVE) occurs, setting the stage for the ensuing discussion of two features ...

Post-9/11 Media Coverage Of Terrorism, Zachary S. Mitnik

Student Theses

Media coverage of terrorist attacks plays an important role in shaping the public understanding of terrorism. While there have been several studies analyzing coverage of terrorist incidents prior to 9/11, there has been little research examining post-9/11 coverage. This study fills this gap by examining the media’s coverage of terrorism in the United States between the dates of September 12, 2001 and December 31, 2015. The analysis is based on a list of terrorist-related incidents and New York Times articles written on each incident. This study documents the amount of coverage received by these incidents and identifies ...

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

Geographies Of Absence: Radicalization And The Shaping Of The New Syrian Territoriality, Omar Abdulaziz Hallaj

New England Journal of Public Policy

In November 2015, the United States and the Russian Federation convened the main international stakeholders engaged in the Syrian conflict to broker the Vienna Accords. The unfolding political process culminated in the issuing of UN Security Council Resolution 2254. Since then the situation has evolved rapidly, ushering in a new outlook for the resolution of the six-year-old civil war. The conflicting parties in Syria have not yet fathomed the momentum of this deal. Some progress has been made as part of successive attempts to establish a “cessation of hostilities,” but there have not yet been any major breakthroughs because the ...

Understanding The Appeal Of Isis, Lydia Wilson

New England Journal of Public Policy

The Islamic State, or ISIS, has proven to be persistently successful in attracting people from all over the globe to join in its state-building and state-defending enterprise. This article explores the messages it has crafted, from the utopian to the militarily defensive, and the techniques it uses to propagate these messages (including on social media), which includes some historical comparisons to communism and Nazism. It goes on to provide initial research findings from the field to show how their message is working among (a small percentage of) the target audience, sketching the theory of identity fusion to argue that it ...

Journal of Sport Safety and Security

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the influence of the Boston Marathon Bombing on sport management in three gulf coast states. Sport terrorism has affected major sporting events around the world since 1972. Four years ago, terror struck again in Boston. For this study, respondents included public safety managers and directors of professional athletic facilities. Information from 10 respondents was recorded, transcribed, and coded into themes. The themes of “Lone wolf,” “Perimeter,” “Are You Threatening Me?” and “Table Top” emerged, thus indicating a heightened awareness. This research may aid in the security preparation for sport management practitioners.

Bridges And Bandits On The Road To The New Jerusalem: A Study Of The Correlation Between Immigration And Terrorism, Amy C. Searl, Stanley G. Schwartz, Ethan Beck, Unix Diza, Jana M. Minich

The Research and Scholarship Symposium

In late January of 2017, President Trump signed an executive order banning non-American citizens traveling into the United States from seven different countries. The title of the order was, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.” As implied, the stated purpose was to limit the number of immigrants in order to avoid future attacks. For the order to serve a purpose, immigration must play a role in terrorism. Thus, the essential point of disagreement is whether a connection exists between the influx of migrants—especially those from terror-prone nations—and the occurrence of terrorist activity in ...

New England Journal of Public Policy

Violent extremism represents a serious challenge to open and democratic societies. This article presents a framework for understanding violent extremism in the context of “lone-wolf” attacks in Western societies. The framework combines social, political, and psychological factors and highlights the importance of integrating the available evidence from multiple disciplines to develop cogent, effective policy. Specifically, in addition to a broad survey of motivational factors, the article draws on terror management theory to provide insight into the interaction between religiosity and violence.

Counterextremism programs are most successful at mitigating the risk of violence when they are focused on behavior, rather than ...

The Effect U.S. Conflict Has On Supreme Court Decisions Regarding Electronic Surveillance

Master's Capstone Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to explore Supreme Court influences, more specifically the effect of US foreign conflict on electronic surveillance cases. Electronic surveillance is a primary contingent of the Congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and a hotly debated issue in the 21st century. However, the contentious use of electronic surveillance dates back to the Supreme Court case of Olmstead v. United States (1928). There have been various other electronic surveillance cases brought before the Supreme Court but the five selected in this case study are a mixture of peace and wartime cases that illustrate ...

All Articles in Terrorism Studies

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally ...

Mineta Transportation Institute Publications

Attempts to sabotage rails and deliberately derail passenger trains have a long history in conventional and guerrilla warfare as well as during some particularly bitter labor disputes in the past. Since the 1970s, political fanatics have become a major adversary. Terrorists have sought to derail trains to achieve high-casualty events, while anarchists and issue oriented extremists have attacked rails to attract attention to their causes and impose economic damage. In this report, we examine the more than a thousand attempts to derail trains and to attack rail infrastructure to discern overall patterns and trends. We then look at four subsets ...

The Path To Terrorism: The Islamic State And Its Recruitment Strategies, Laura Turner

Honors Scholar Theses

The Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, a terrorist organization that commits acts of such brutality that even Al Qaeda has denounced it, has recruited approximately 21,000 foreign fighters from countries all over the world. Why is this group so appealing? What has made it so effective at recruitment? What methods does it employ to recruit so many individuals? This paper seeks to answer these questions by examining the recruitment strategies of ISIS. Case studies of individual foreign fighters are analyzed to assess the strength of three explanations of ISIS’ recruitment methods that dominate the current literature: strategic targeting ...

Mineta Transportation Institute Publications

Ramming attacks in which drivers deliberately plow their vehicles into public gatherings, pedestrians, or bicyclists, have become an increasingly common terrorist tactic. This MTI Security Perspective, by Brian Michael Jenkins and Bruce R. Butterworth analyzes 78 vehicular attacks between January 1973 and April 2018. According to their analysis, it is a growing trend, and a frightening one. The 78 attacks led to 281 deaths and around 1,200 injuries. Sixteen attacks took place between 1973 and 2007, while 62 took place between 2008 and April 2018. Thirty of these occurred in 2017 and the first four months of 2018 alone.

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Churches are a soft target for people with malicious intentions. They are filled with a large amount of people, including large groups of children and elderly folk. Religions also encourage people to be friendlier towards outsiders, which could result in the church goers lowering their defenses and being more vulnerable to attacks. Church security teams are also primarily composed of volunteers, which means there is limited experience in security protocol and that could lead to limited incentive to perform security tasks thoroughly. Churches are a crucial part of the spiritual wellness of a community. All these factors make churches a ...

Emergency Action Plan For Lakeview Recreation Center, Jade Fessler

HLS 494 Practicum/Capstone Project

The objective of the Lakeview Recreation Center Emergency Action Plan (EAP) is to comply with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) Emergency Action Plan Standard, 29 CFR 1910.38 and to prepare employees for dealing with emergency situations. This plan is designed to minimize injury, loss of human life and company resources by training employees, procuring, and maintaining necessary equipment and assigning responsibilities. This plan addresses all emergencies that may reasonably be expected to occur at Lakeview Recreation Center.

Clark County Fire & Rescue: Partnership Proposal, Samuel Gillenwater

HLS 494 Practicum/Capstone Project

(HLS) has evolved to combat our nations threats. Emergency preparedness is one area that must remain in a continuous state of increasing improvement. Federal entities, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have developed hundreds of plans, policies, and procedures to mitigate a wide range of emergency situations from natural disasters to terrorism. This paper will address the collective approach our federal agencies want to see at the local level, and more specifically how first responders can combine efforts to deliver a more effective service. First Responders are the foundation to our nations stability and mitigating elements.

Living Water Church: Emergency Action Plan, Angela Hage

HLS 494 Practicum/Capstone Project

Fires, lockdowns, and active shooters are all too common in today’s world. In June 2017, a house in Waterbury Connecticut caught on fire while service was being held in the church adjacent to it (Stewart, 2017). In March 2018, a church in Mississippi was placed on lockdown while law enforcement officials used the grounds as a staging area during an active investigation (WAPT News, 2018). And in November 2017, a gunman opened fire inside First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Twenty-six people lost their lives, and many more were gravely wounded in the deadliest mass shooting in an ...

HLS 494 Practicum/Capstone Project

The city of Olympia, Washington rests just inland of one of the biggest tectonic plate fault lines in all of North America, this is what is known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Scientists believe that it is only a matter of time until there is a massive mega-quake due to the tectonic plates friction as we can read, “the plates are stuck, and the stress will build up until the fault suddenly breaks. This last happened in 1700: the result was an earthquake on the order of magnitude 9.0, followed within minutes by a large tsunami—much like the ...

Terrorism Risk Insurance: Is It Really Working?, Rebecca Demarest

Honors Projects in Mathematics

This paper investigates terrorism risk insurance in the United States as well as those programs offered in other countries throughout the world. In the United States, particular attention is devoted to the interaction of government with private insurers to maintain an effective insurance program. An analysis is performed comparing terrorism insurance before and after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The paper looks into actual terrorist events that have occurred focusing on 56 world-wide events that are associated with property losses greater than $10 million. This paper not only investigates the losses that were incurred ...

Creativity In Two Types Of Violent Groups, Laramie Sproles

Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Terrorism can be defined as a type of ideologically motivated violence that arises during asymmetrical conflict and has far-reaching psychological effects beyond the immediate target. This project seeks to isolate and examine one element of terrorism: ideologically-motivated violence. While malevolent innovation has been written about extensively over the past five years, little is known about correlates of creativity in actual violent individuals. At the broadest level, the current project focuses on personality profiles and creative problem solving of two different types of violent individuals. The goal of this study is to examine individual differences that characterize two types of violent ...

A Comparative Study Of Extreme Religious Nationalist Terrorist Groups In The United States, Colleen Arthur

Undergraduate Research Posters

The aim of this paper is to conduct a comparative study of Radical Right Wing terrorism and Radical Islamic terrorism both of which are categorized under the Religious Nationalism/Extremism typology of terrorism. In order to compare and contrast the two fairly, I broke down the ideology, motives, methods, and the demographic profile of members of both Radical Right Wing and Radical Islamic terrorism then provided examples of different groups that fall within those categories in order to effectively illustrate the striking similarities of the two categories that have been addressed and condemned differently by the United States. Then I ...

London Has Fallen: A Case Study On Global City Branding, Terrorism And Crisis Communication, Fallon Porter

The year of 2017 brought challenges to London in the form of the four terror attacks that occurred throughout the year, negatively affecting London’s image and industries while creating a precarious environment for crisis management. The purpose of this project was to closely examine the effects of terrorism on London’s place brand and how London’s key actors and organizations responded to the unusual year of terror attacks. The #LondonisOpen for summer campaign represented both the impact of the terror attacks on tourism and the need to address terrorism in a strategic way. Additionally, key actors such as ...

An Analysis Of The Changing Modus Operandi Of Terrorist Attacks In Europe, Hasan Arslan, Elizabeth Molloy

Student and Faculty Research Days

There is a sharp increase in both the number of incidents and the deaths caused by different types of attacks in Europe recently. The assailants claimed these attacks either on behalf of Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL) or as "lone wolves" with no direct affiliation to the ISIL. However, there has been some change in the way some of the attacks were carried out. Also, there was a shift in their target selection. Security experts and authorities have indicated significant factors contributing to this development. This paper examines the apparent alarming trend in the change of terrorist modus ...

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, terrorism and radicalization has been a consistent issue that many countries have faced. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has been the most recent in a long trail of organizations that have sought to strike terror against the western world. However, ISIS is distinguished from other groups, like Al-Qaeda, in that ISIS supports a complex propaganda machine. Although ISIS is not the first organization to use the social media platform, they are the first to use it with such diversity. The two main channels that ISIS uses to spread their propaganda messages are through social ...

Honors in the Major Theses

During its violent spread across the Middle East, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) amassed both a local and international following in large part due to its usage of emergent media distribution. Beginning in 2014, ISIS’s Ministry of Media published an English-language magazine, Dabiq, disseminating its issues through online platforms. Dabiq and its successor Rumiyah both serve as propagandistic recruitment material for ISIS’s international community as well as broadcasting the message of the jihadist movement to ISIS’s enemies. This study analyzed ISIS’s publications using a qualitative content analysis in order to identify jihadist recruitment ...

A Case Study Of Veteran And Civilian Student Academic Performance At The University Of Central Florida, Floyd C. Diehl Jr

Honors in the Major Theses

This study seeks to provide a brief overview of academic standards and performance of veterans of the United States military and civilians who attend the University of Central Florida. Whether a student is a veteran or a civilian, he or she must learn how to adapt to the requirements of an academic community in order to be successful in that environment. It may be difficult for some. In able for society to discern the importance of the academic performance of both veterans and civilians alike, research is vital. There are various assumptions about veterans. For example, it can be assumed ...